With academic and visual wit…balances the dizzying notion that identity and stress…the body’s psychological landscape, remain locked in perpetual movement… — OneMedia.com, December 2000 –Colin Berry

Despite her years of work and influence as one of the world’s leading choreographers, dancers and filmmakers, Yvonne Rainer (born 1934) has until now not received the retrospective exhibition in Europe that her career deserves. Yvonne Rainer: Space, Body, Language is published for exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and covers the full spectrum of her work, starting from her foundational New York dance works such as The Mind Is a Muscle (1968), which created a new physical language out of everyday gestures and humdrum objects such as mattresses, barbells and bubblewrap. Moving to her political and feminist films between 1976 and 1996, which took the filmic montage features of her dance (and her incorporation of filmed actions of hands and volleyballs in her performances) to their next level, Space, Body, Language brings us up to the present with Rainer’s return to choreography in 2000 and such recent compositions as Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 (2011) and Spiraling Down (2008). This catalogue presents previously unseen documentation of stage works, notebooks, an astonishing number of dance scores, scripts, movie and exhibition posters and a carefully compiled appendix, as well as essays by Douglas Crimp, Gabriele Brandstetter, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Volker Pantenburg, Catherine Wood and editors Yilmaz Dziewior and Barbara Engelbach.

Throughout the 20th century, the performing and visual arts have often converged. As artists investigated the embodied value of form, dancers and choreographers experimented with interfaces between annotation and improvisation. These encounters are the focus of this collection, which discusses the interaction of the two mediums since the first public performance of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962. Contributors include Cindy Van Acker, Gabriele Brandstetter, Sarah Burkhalter, Pauline Chevalier, Mark Franko, Katrin Gattinger, Julie Enckell Julliard, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Magali Le Mens, Laetitia Legros, Anna Lovatt, Nolwenn Mégard, Robert Morris, OpenEndedGroup, Nadia Perucic, Catherine Quéloz, Yvonne Rainer, Robin Rhode, Susan Rosenberg, Laurence Schmidlin, Katia Schneller, Alexander Schwan, Alan Storey and Catherine Wood.